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The Lucky Seeds Fall Onto Good Ground At seventeen months, the grandmother that she thought was her mother, was ripped from her life. By two, the mother she thought was her sister, without reservations, signed her over to strangers. At four, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the darkest cloud she had ever seen, spread across the land, its frightening fingers seeking out even the most remote places, the otherwise-bright places, the pockets of innocence that had sheltered her. Like her parents’ generation, re-shaped by the Great Depression of 1929, she too slept thereafter in the safe but unsafe nights of dark possibilities. Except for the war, her childhood was all pinks and yellows. As she lay in tall grass, she watched clouds carry dead faces to their heavenly destinations. She had a blue-and- white Schwinn bike, and a white, freckled horse. The war ended. Life resumed, spinning her final years of childhood into the turbulent trauma of puberty, where patches of skin were either too dry or too oily. She was speeding through a tunnel too small, until suddenly she popped out the other end, blossoming, like a flower for the bee. Actually, when the bee came, she thought it was a knight in shining armor. Together they rode the flaxen getaway horse into the proverbial golden sunset. The next time the bee came, it was clearly a bee. Now her grandchildren indulge her. Their minds wander as she tells them how a B-29 crash-landed in a field near her house during the end of the war; how when she was very little, her family had the only flush-toilet in the community, and the school children came to see it. One of them was chosen to pull the gleaming silver handle and watch the water swirl magically away. She tells them how she walked everywhere she went, that just because your family had a car, was no reason to think you should ride in it. Stories for every occasion she has, but children are caught up in another world, and they scamper away, leaving her in mid-sentence. She sighs and finishes the story to herself, being careful each time to include all the rehearsed embellishments. |
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